The Church Schools as Architects of Education

The Church Schools as Architects of Education By Frank R. Arnold

In the Church schools of Utah lies almost exclusively the one opportunity of the state to educate leaders. The public high schools are devoting themselves mainly to pleasing their constituents. And they think they please them best if they take their children and train them in some gainful occupation. The immediate dollar values of education are what must ever be kept before the mind of the parent. Hence we have auto- mobiles, woodwork, iron work, commerce and agriculture for the boys; sewing and cooking for the girls; and with this as much English as the pupil may be persuaded to take and as much history, science, and language as he feels inclined to pursue. This is the usual drift of high school education, not only in Utah but in surrounding states. It has many excellent features. It neglects no one. The children of every taxpayer can read English and work with their hands, and so a high school education does not require any special mental aptitude and is within the reach of all. The child is perfectly free to follow his own devices in the educational world. If he doesn't like French, he can always drop it; and if algebra is too hard, there is always something easy, for which it may be exchanged. And yet the system sins in leaving too much to the incompetent, immature judgment of the high school student, in allowing him to start many things and abandon them if he doesn't like them, in giving him too narrow view of the world of knowledge, and in giving too little opportunity to the exceptional child, the child who is better endowed mentally than his mates and who is to be one of the leaders of tomorrow. In the divine scheme of things, some men have received one talent and some, ten. This means that we are not all born with equal mental ability and that you have to have two types of schools. Formerly, these were represented by the classical high school and the technical. But more and more the word classical is becoming odious, and even the word technical has become so incomprehensible to the masses that both words are disappearing from the language of our voters, while the manual training high school is a term that everyone can understand.

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It is in the education of the men of ten talents that lies the opportunity of the Church high schools. They must recognize the men of tomorrow, who are to be leaders. These are easy to select. The Church must send a trumpet call to them in this fashion: "Come to us. We will give you an exceptionally good ed- ucation. We recognize that the finest products of history, re- ligion, or education are a blend of many obscure and remote influences. And so we shall ask you to study many subjects of which you may not see the immediate use. We may even expect you to study Latin as a basis of the accurate vocabulary which we shall expect of you later; mathematics as a foundation for the technical calculations you may be called upon to do. We may expect you to study history as a training for political life and not as a collection of romantic stories. We expect you to read widely and think deeply and write as creatively as may be expected from your age. We want to have you ready to compete with students of high school age in any part of the world, whether they are fitting for college work at Oxford, Harvard, or Paris. We think that the Church owes you this education, for we know that the state, at present, can educate only the masses, is subservient to the masses, and we do not think the masses want or need this type of education. In re- turn, we expect you to submit to the discipline of education. We are going to tell you what is best for you to study and we are going to give you the best teachers. We are going to employ experts whose opinion you and your parents must respect. These experts are meant to lead you, not to cater to the whims and caprices of you and your parents. When you build a house you employ an architect, and you don't pay him to listen to your advice but to supply you with valuable, expert knowl- edge. In much the same way the Church into which you were born is going to be the architect of your education. It is going to be an honor to be educated in a Church high school. We are wisely cutting down the number so that we may employ the best teachers and do the best work. The Church, throughout all the coming ages, will need leaders. God has given you the brains, to be some sort of a leader, either as teacher, lawyer, or community director; education must develop these divinely bestowed brains and we offer you something different and bet- ter than the city or county high school. It is for you to prove that you are worthy of the attention you are to receive from the greatest teacher in the world, your Church." Is there need in the state of something better than the usual high school? Three years ago a graduate of a county high school in southern Utah was asked what he had studied, and it came out that he had had no science, except camp cooking

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and botany; no languages and no geometry. One wonders what he had been doing during his four years of study. And yet he was naturally an uncommonly bright fellow and longed to study everything. In one of the large towns of Utah a prom- inent lawyer recently was talking about the education of his two boys in the first year in high school. "I want those boys," said he, "to get good mental discipline, to learn how to study under inspiring teachers, and to fit themselves for college work at Harvard. I knew they couldn't get this at the home high school. There they pay more attention to growing beets than to mathematics. As if a boy in our valley couldn't grow beets without being taught at school! I hated to send the boys away from home, and so I took them to the Church high school and picked out their courses and teachers myself. But even then I didn't get what I wanted. I wish the Church would show us how to run the model high school for exceptionally good students. The Church, in connection with its normal schools, has given us the best grade schools we have ever had because they picked their pupils. Why not go a step further and give us the best high school?" And then, why not another step! To emphasize further the all-important fact that man shall not live by bread alone, and that life is not made up entirely of gasoline engines and sugar beets, the state needs one or two of the small cultural colleges such as have become the intellectual background of New England and Ohio. The State will never give us a Dart- mouth College, nor a Williams, but the Church could. It would take only a few strong teachers to transform the Brigham Young College in Logan and the Dixie Normal in St. George into literary and scientific colleges, the equal of any in the east. Our state universities, all through the west, are too crowded and too worldly to have a distinctly cultural atmosphere and our agricultural colleges are developing the trade school side more rapidly than the college element, so we need the small college to preserve the precious heritage of knowledge which may not have dollars and cents written all over it but which, nevertheless, supplies valuable elements in the development of the finest minds. The life of the small group of choice spirits has ever been superior to that of what Shakespeare calls the "fool multitude." And there is still another step that the Church in Utah alone can take. The Brigham Young University should become one of the famous Church universities of the world, renowned for its school of theology, its courses in comparative religions, its training school for missionaries and other Church workers, as well as being distinguished by the usual scholarly work of a great university. In the course of centuries it should be to the Church of Latter-day Saints what Louvain is to